So here it is... My very long blog about my time in gaming, eSports and specifically SC2. Thanks for taking the time to read, I'll go into depth and this wont be edited a great deal so it'll probably be a big wall of text.

To start off, I'll talk about my beginnings in games in general - but more specifically, RTS games.
Part 2 will probably be about my start in SC2 and eSports. Part 3 will hopefully be about what I've learnt from that and how its all come to an end with SYF and my thoughts and insight into that.

I feel like iaguz calling myself a 'young lad' but I digress... I grew up with one brother, who ended up being quite a nerd - an awesome one, but nerd af, and in a household blessed with technology. My dad worked as the IT manager for the Health Service, so my family was naturally pretty early to pick up new technology. I should preface this with the fact I'm old, born in 1985 - when I was a kid, most families didn't have computers. Even less had the internet. Anyway, I played all sorts of games sharing time with my brother and being four years younger than him, he got quite annoyed when I started getting better than him - this for me, started the competitive drive. To this day, I only really enjoy games where I verse other people. RPG's have zero appeal. As I started exploring games I would play basically anything, back then there were a lot of platform games, puzzle games and in particular a golfing game called Links. This was where I learnt how to abuse games, in Links - if you hit the ball off the map for that hole, you would get to drop the ball somewhere near the edge of where it went out, However, you could then correct that drop as far as you could see, which was often the entire hole. Naturally I worked out I could always be on the green after the first shot and basically set a score of 36 for a round of golf. A score my Dad and brother struggled to match - little did they know!

This 'abusing' games carried on for awhile, I learnt how games could be modified, there was a sick roller-skating-bloodbowl-esque game called Hyper Blade (10/10 sickest game of the time), in that game, I worked out all the sound files were .wav files in the director called a certain thing, naturally my friend and I decided it would be a laugh to record a bunch of audio files (us talking shit) save them as the various names, then copy them onto another friends save of the game and **** with all his in-game sounds. This kind of tomfoolery was carried out at various LANs we had with mates, those were the days - no sleep all weekend until by Sunday afternoon I could swear I could see terrorist out of the corners of my eye from playing too much Counter Strike. Back when you had to connect computers together like the data was plumbing, you needed a end piece so the data didn't spill out the end of the physical cable and the various computers needed to be daisy chained together using T-Pieces... This always caused hours of delays in setting up the network - you kids have it easy these days....

These LAN days continued until we got the INTERNET and shit got real. I had a good friend who also had a rather tech savvy family and they also were early adaptors to the internet and shit changed hard when we learnt you could connect as though it was a LAN over the internet and play all our favourite LAN games from home! Of course these hours of gaming tied up our phone line and I'm sure I've got hearing loss from the modem's constant stretching noise (my first modem was top of the line at 28.8 kb/s... That was fast... This is why Malcom Turbull thinks NBN is good....).I Imagine game designers realised that gamers were playing their LAN capable games via Himachi and other online LAN applications. So they developed ONLINE play. The first game that captured me was Diablo 1... Now this also connects with my love for bending the rules of games and yes, I used trainers (cheat programs) there was no anti-cheat and I basically used it really to train myself up to be as strong as possible, this helped me with PvP bouts (challenge matches for gear) and in grinding the game for the best gear - so much so I had probably the best set, I rare saw anyone online with similar gear (later updates of these trainers allowed you to stack the stats of your gear too, I did this also...) but once I had everything, it got boring.. I would then go into newbie games with 2 or 3 people in the game (max 4) and had memorised the maps (some people thought it was random, it was there was like 10 different variants) and would teleport past everything to speed run to diablo, use my stacked gear and abilities to kill diablo super fast and in turn, end the server. Meaning the newbies trying to farm The Butcher for gear had to restart a fresh new server and go back in from lvl 1. (no their character, just the map).

How I developed from all this? Well it really set me up to enjoy games, I then fell in love with multiplayer and playing with friends, then the bug to fight and be the best took over, I've been really competitive all my life and gaming was no different.

(Note, this blog isn't in chronological order, some of the below happened before Diablo 1 release in 1996)
I am so ******* old I played (arguably) the very first RTS game, Dune 2 made by Westwood Studios, who would go on to define RTS games with their follow up RTS game Command & Conquer (Westwood Studios - I believe - was where our beloved Dustin Browder started making games). Dune 2 was a really shitty RTS game, you could only select 1 unit at a time and because there was so much in game assistance & automation you didn't immerse into the game like follow up RTS games. Command & Conquer was the first big RTS game and of course I was hooked from the start. Grinding away at the story mode, then to vs AI then vs my friends I had to be the best. I would read up strategies, practice them vs AI then attempt to execute them against my friends gradually developing more and more strategies I got quite good at the game. Follow up RTS games and really the game industry blew up at the time, i can remember which games I was playing, probably a different one each week for awhile & LANing them, as mentioned above.. Until in the late 90s when the tale begins. StarCraft 1. Wow that game was next level - its such a great game, not only for how incredibly immersive the complex mechanics make it, but if you think about how good that game was all of a sudden amidst what was being released at the time, this game was genuinely next level. I of course, was completely hooked. Ever other game was pushed aside and I would play hours a day, every day - every moment away from school and homework (or being dragged with family to something I hated - I was just a teenager when SC1 came out). This grind of SC1 and then SC:BW really solidified my love for games. Like most teenagers that played too many games back then, our parents weren't really supportive of gaming too much and wouldn't buy me the gear needed (cause a better keyboard or PC part makes you better at games, right?) However, by this time a local PC store started running LAN events, 30-50 nerds from my local town would rock up to these LANs, pay a few bucks entry and for a stack of pizza's and game all weekend. They would hold competitions for CSGO and SC:BW - they ran these almost monthly and I would always win the BW 1v1 and only once lost the 2v2 competitions (granted I did miss the odd lan but I would go to 80% of them)... So now I was earning sick loot from my gaming exploits and while I was pretty hooked by then, this sealed the deal. To quantify how good I was, or more so how bad my local scene was at SC:BW - I did also play ICCUP and peaked for a bit in C-rank which would be kinda mid masters level??..

I can't imagine growing up without these experiences and SC:BW was a huge part of my life for many years..

So come the later teen years, I focused a bit more on school & my social life and started to turn into a casual gamer, I played a bunch of GTA on my PlayStation and a fair amount of FIFA. But other than that, I was studying and being a more social adolescent. I got older, moved away from home and had a baby (quite young in my early 20s - My daughter Sienna is now almost 9). I met my now fiance after a previous long relationship ended just a bit before my 21st birthday, we clicked immediately and it was great - but I wasn't much of a gamer these days. I'd certainly settled down since my dominating-the-local-scene days of SC:BW. However, I remember, while at uni, baby at home saying to my girlfriend - "I have to warn you, there is a sequel to a game I really loved when I was younger coming out, and I think its going to change me as a person" I was not wrong, this game was StarCraft 2.

I hoped you enjoyed learning a bit more about me, this was a frantic late night ramble and I'm sure the next two parts are going to be waaaay more interesting, I've got some spicy bombs to drop during my time in SC2 & eSports.. (teaser; I've been screwed by sponsors, run into all sorts of characters, paid gag money by sponsors and when someone attempted to bribe/blackmail me - along with a lot of fun stories along the way!..)

I remember the dial up days. Looking back i don't know how we managed! Now everyone complains over a bit of ping and a page taking more than a second to load. #progress

And old school LAN's (either at mates, or early gaming cafes) with classic games, pizza's and leeching were often what weekends were make of in teenage years. Great fun! #memories Pre esports times, when no one new how to 'play properly', or what practice was/had reason to!

Awesome to hear the back story although I did cringe when I read the "with the fact I'm old, born in 1985 " being a 1983 baby myself. But a lot of what I read I can relate to and had some similar experiences, although competitive gaming came a lot later for myself as I did not get internet until near the end of high school.

But oh yes T-Pieces... those dam things! And all night lans, too much counter strike and SC.I still remember playing FPS's with keyboard only until someone discovered mouse look!

Even the smallest donations help keep sc2sea running! All donations go towards helping our site run including our monthly server hosting fees and sc2sea sponsored community tournaments we host. Find out more here.